Polygyny in American Politics Author(s): Laura Betzig and Samantha Weber Source: Politics and the Life Sciences, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Feb., 1993), pp. 45-52 Published by: Association for Politics and the Life Sciences Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4235905 Accessed: 02/07/2010 06:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=apls. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Association for Politics and the Life Sciences is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Politics and the Life Sciences. http://www.jstor.org
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Polygyny in American PoliticsAuthor(s): Laura Betzig and Samantha WeberSource: Politics and the Life Sciences, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Feb., 1993), pp. 45-52Published by: Association for Politics and the Life SciencesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4235905Accessed: 02/07/2010 06:41
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=apls.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Association for Politics and the Life Sciences is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to Politics and the Life Sciences.
Laura Betzig and Samantha Weber University of Michigan, USA
Abstract. Biographical data were collected on members
of the U.S. executive, legislative, and judicial branches, in George Washington's first through Ronald Reagan's last administration, from Who Was Who in America, the
Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress, Vice
Presidents and Cabinet Members, and Burkes Presidential
Families of the United States of America. They suggest that
serial polygyny in this sample has declined over the last
two hundred years. Census data on average American
men suggest that the number of wives per man has
stayed the same or increased at the same time. These
trends imply that mating equality may have increased
over the last two centuries of American history. What
sketchy evidence exists on extramarital opportunities
tentatively suggests a similar trend.
Laura Betzig is Adjunct Assistant Research Scientist in the
Department of Biology at the University of Michigan. She is an
anthropologist whose particular interest is politics and sex in Darwinian perspective. In addition to numerous articles, Dr.
Betzig is author of Despotism and Differential Reproduction: A Darwinian View of History (1986) and coeditor of Human Re-
productive Behavior: A Darwinian Perspective (1988). She has been affiliated with the Evolution and Human Behavior Pro-
gram at the University of Michigan for the past seven years. Samantha Weber is a graduate student in the School of
Natural Resources at the University of Michigan. She holds an
undergraduate degree in general biology and is working on a master's degree in conservation biology and ecosystem manage- ment. Ms. Weber was previously employed as a ranger in re- sources management for the National Park Service. She is interested in using evolutionary theory to help understand why humans use natural resources as they do and how we might promote conservation, recycling, and wiser decision-making. Correspondence to the authors should be addressed to The Evolution and Human Behavior Program, 100 Rackham, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
THE
VAST MAJORITY of the world's societies
allow, or have allowed, harem polygyny (e.g., Mur-
dock and Wilson, 1973; Betzig, 1986; White,
1988). In most cultures the most powerful men collect, or have collected, the most women. Among others, Iranian Yomut (Irons, 1979), Venezuelan Yanomamo
(Chagnon, Flinn, and Melancon, 1979), Utah Mormon
(Faux and Miller, 1984; Mealey, 1985); Paraguayan Ache
(Kaplan and Hill, 1985), Micronesian Ifaluk (T?rke and
Kipsigis (Borgerhoff Mulder, 1987), Aka Pygmy (Hew- lett, 1988), nineteenth-century Swedish (Low, 1990), Ke-
nyan Mukogodo (Cronk, 1991), Efe Pygmy (Bailey,
1991), eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Norwegian
(R0skaft, Wara, and Viken, 1992), and twentieth-
century Canadian (Perusse, 1993) men with extra status
or resources have enjoyed extra marriages or matings
(reviewed in Betzig, 1988). Dominant men have had
access to harems of hundreds or even thousands of
women (Betzig, 1986). For powerful men, monogamy is clearly the excep-
tion. But for millenia, powerful men in the West have
confined themselves to just one wife at once. That is, they have had access to one "legitimate," heir-bearing wife at
a time (e.g., Goody, 1983). Monogamous marriage,
though, may have little to do with monogamous mating. In some cases, in fact, it probably coexists with high variance in male reproductive success?a measure of
polygyny (see Bateman, 1948; Wade, 1979; and Daly and
Wilson, 1983:153). For example, emperors and other
wealthy Romans, who married just one legitimate wife, were notoriously adulterous (e.g., Carcopino, 1940;
Syme, 1960; Veyne, 1987); they kept as many as three
Acknowledgements. Thanks to Richard Alexander and the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology for a grant covering the costs of some of this research.
Politics and the Life Sciences February 1993 0730-9384/93/010045-8 US$08.00 ? Beech Tree Publishing 1993 45
Polygyny
hundred socially sanctioned "concubines" at once
(Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Commodus Antoninus, v. 4); and they had potentially reproductive intercourse
with tens or even hundreds of household slaves (Betzig, 1992c). An association between monogamous marriage and highly polygynous mating has been common across civilizations (Betzig, 1992a,b,d).
There are at least two ways in which men who marry monogamously might mate polygynously. One is by hav-
ing children by more than one wife in sequence, that is,
by serial polygyny. The other is by having children by women other than their wives, that is, by harem polygyny.
So far, it is unclear how much monogamous mating and marriage have converged in the West, including the United States. More and more attention is being paid to the problem (e.g., Rogers, 1990; T?rke, 1990). From a Darwinian perspective, it is a critical one. If men who have what it takes to support more than one mate do not, then why not? One possibility is that people have failed to respond adaptively to environmental change (see Bar-
kow, 1989; MacDonald, 1990). The other possibility is that people are responding to change adaptively.
Monogamy has been argued to be an adaptive re-
sponse to the increased importance of competition be- tween coalitions (Alexander, 1975, 1979, 1987) and to the division of labor that culminated in industrialization
(Betzig, 1982,1986,1991). To Alexander, "monogamy is a way of leveling the reproductive opportunities of men,
thereby reducing their competitiveness and increasing their likelihood of cooperativeness" in the face of "ex- trinsic threats" (Alexander 1975:71-72). To Betzig, sub- ordinates should be in a position to bargain with dominants?for equal rights, equal resources, and equal access to mates?to the extent that their services are
essential and irreplaceable. A division of labor should make them more of both (see Betzig, 1986:103-6).
But any attempt to explain the trend toward monog- amy in modern societies must first document that trend. This paper starts at the tip of the iceberg. It shows how serial polygyny among politicians in the United States has declined over the past two hundred years.
Methods
We focused on U.S. politicians for three reasons. First, data on Americans, as opposed to members of any other
society, are most abundant in U.S. libraries. Second, more biographical, including genealogical, data appear to exist on politicians than on any other group in the U.S.
Third, across cultures, heads of political hierarchies con-
sistently have had more mates than anybody else (Betzig, 1986). We focused on serial marriage because data on other behaviors that should contribute to polygyny, in-
cluding data on extra pair matings and on numbers of children produced by legitimate and illegitimate mates,
Data on serial marriages were
collected on men in all three branches
of U.S. government?the executive,
judicial, and legislative?from George
Washington's first through Ronald
Reagan's last administration
are relatively unavailable and unreliable. What little
information exists on extramarital opportunities is
summed up in the discussion section.
In this study, the most complete data on U.S. politi- cians come from Burke's Presidential Families of the
United States of America (1981). Second best are data
from three collections of short biographies, Who Was
Who in America ( 1967), the Biographical Dictionary of the
United States Congress (1978), and Vice Presidents and
Cabinet Members (1979). Data were collected on men in
all three branches of U.S. government?the executive,
judicial, and legislative?from George Washington's first through Ronald Reagan's last administration.
Members of the executive branch included presidents, vice presidents, and all major cabinet secretaries; mem-
bers of the judicial branch included all Supreme Court
justices; and members of the legislative branch included
all speakers of the House and Senate presidents pro tern.
Data on all presidents and vice presidents were col-
lected from both Who Was Who and from Burkes; data
on all cabinet secretaries from the Washington through the Nixon administrations were collected from Who Was
Who, the Biographical Dictionary of the United States, and
Vice Presidents and Cabinet Members. Since each of the
last three sources turned out to be about equally com-
plete (see Table 1), data on cabinet members in the
Carter, Ford, and Reagan administrations, as well as on
all members of the legislative and judicial branches, were
collected from Who Was Who alone. For the cabinet
members on whom three sources were consulted, the
source listing the largest number of wives was used in
each individual case. The assumption underlying that
decision, which we think is a strong one, is that biogra-
phers are more prone to omit a marriage than to invent
one. For presidents and vice presidents, Burkes, always the most complete source, was always used.
These data have been compared to estimates of the
number of marriages made by average American men at
similar periods in time. Primary sources include the
United States Bureau of the Census' Historical Statistics
of the United States (1975) and Statistical Abstracts of the
United States (1987); secondary sources include Jacob-
son's American Marriage and Divorce (1959) and Cher-
lin's Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage (1981).
46 Politics and the Life Sciences February 1993
Polygyny
Table 1. Three Sources on Number of Wives Assembled by Major Cabinet Secretaries in U.S. History
Years of Inauguration
WWW BDUS VPCM
1789-1799 1800-1809
1810-1819
1820-1829 1830-1839
1840-1849 1850-1859
1860-1869
1870-1879 1880-1889
1890-1899
1900-1909 1910-1919
1920-1929
1930-1939
1940-1949
1950-1959 1960-1969
1970-1979
13/11
14/11 12/10
14/09
14/12 40/32 24/20
40/29
17/16 40/30
27/21
19/20 21/18
34/29
19/1.4
32/28
26/22 41/39
16/16
13/11 14/11
12/10
14/09 14/12 37/30
23/20
43/32
19/18 49/33
32/25
19/20 21/18
39/31
21/15 31/28
23/22 41/39
16/15
11/10 13/10
12/10
11/07
12/11 38/30 23/19
41/30
19/18 42/30
32/26
18/19 19/17
34/29
20/15
31/28
23/21 38/37
17/16
Note: Sources include Who Was Who in America (WWW), Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress (BDUS), and Vice Presidents and Cabinet Members (VPCM). Each column lists number of wives per number of men, for each decade of inauguration.
Results
As Table 2 makes clear, American politicians have, over-
all, had fewer wives over time. The most dramatic decline
has been among the 94 male supreme court justices. Justices inaugurated under the first 20 presidents, Wash-
ington through Garfield, from 1789 through 1881, had
1.5 wives on average; those inaugurated under the last 20
presidents, Arthur through Reagan, from 1882 through 1988, averaged just 1.11 wives. Second most dramatic has
been the decline in the legislature, where house speakers and senate presidents pro tern had 1.34 wives on average in the first cohort, and 1.09 wives on average in the
second.
Least dramatic has been the decline among members
of the executive branch, where a total of 523 presidents, vice presidents, and cabinet secretaries had 1.24 wives on
average in the first cohort, and 1.16 wives on average in
the second. For all 696 men in the legislative, judicial, and executive samples, the number of wives per man has
declined from 1.29 to 1.16. All are significant changes. On average, men in all these samples had roughly 1.2
wives (Table 3). How do these declines compare to trends among
average American men? Figure 1 plots Jacobson's
(1959) estimates of the number of men married in each
year from 1900 through 1950 in the United States (from
Table 2. Mean Number of Wives of U.S. Politicians, 1789-1988
S.D.
All 696 Men
Washington-Garf ?eld 294 1.289 .630
Arthur-Reagan 402 1.157 .461
t=3.202, d.f. = 694, p = .0007
Executive
Washington-Garf?eld 202 1.243 .627
Arthur-Reagan 321 1.162 .439
f= 1.727, d.f. = 521, ? = .0424
Legislative Washington-Garf ield 67 1.343 .617
Arthur-Reagan 42 1.095 .431
f=2.279, d.f. = 107, ? = .0123
Judicial
Washington-Garf?eld 42 1.500 .634
Arthur-Reagan 52 1.115 .615
f=2.972, d.f. = 92, ? = .0019
Note: Men ?n Washington?Garf?eld cohort were inaugurated 1789-1881; men in Arthur-Reagan cohort were inaugurated 1882-1988. All ? values are for one-tailed tests.
Jacobson's Table 28, p. 68). This area plot is subdivided
into three regions: Grooms single, widowed, and di-
vorced at the time these marriages were made (from Jacobson's Table 30, p. 71). The high point on this plot coincides with the marriage boom after World War II; before and after that spike, the marriage rate gradually increased. Over this 50 year stretch, the average number
of marriages rose from around 60 per 1000 men in 1900, to close to 100 per 1000 men in 1950.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to extend that slope in
either direction with the data at hand. However, Cherlin
(1981) notes that since the divorce rate has been rising at the same time that mortality rates have been falling, the total rate of marital dissolution (the number of mar-
riages ending in either divorce or death in a given year
per 1,000 existing marriages) hardly changed over the
last hundred years. From 1860 to 1864 the combined rate
was 33.2 dissolutions per 1,000 marriages; in 1970 the
combined rate was 34.5. By 1978, however, a dramatic
increase in divorce pushed the combined rate to 40.5
(Cherlin, 1981:25). In other words, marital dissolution
Table 3. Mean Number of Wives per Man in Each Branch of Government
X Variance ?
All 1.213 .294 696
Executive 1.193 .271 523
Legislative 1.248 .318 109
Judicial 1.287 .422 94
Politics and the Life Sciences February 1993 47
Polygyny
1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 Year
Figure 1. U.S. Marriages per 1000 men over 15,1900-1950
Note: Dark area indicates marriages made by single men; striped area indicates marriages made by widowers; spotted area indicates marriages made by divorcees. Data from Jacobson (1959).
among average American men increased slightly be-
tween 1860 and 1970.
Whether or not this has corresponded to a higher
marriage and remarriage rate is not clear. From 1970
through 1984, however, the remarriage rate among men
in the United States increased (U.S. Bureau of the Cen-
sus, 1987:83). In 1970,75.9% of marrying men had never
married before; and 24.1% were remarrying. By 1984, 65.1% of marrying men had always been single; and the
proportion remarrying had risen to 34.9%. At the same
time, the overall marriage rate per 1,000 population in
the United States remained roughly the same (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1987:83 and 1975:64).
To sum up, these figures suggest that while the num-
ber of wives per average American man has gone up, the
number of wives among American public officials has
gone down. Figure 2 supports this conclusion by showing a significant decline in number of wives among all 696
politicians in the sample.
Discussion
American politicians may have been able to collect more
wives than average men for three reasons. One is that
powerful men may have been divorced or widowed more
often. Assuming that higher status correlates with lower
mortality (e.g., Vinovskis, 1972; U.S. Bureau of the Cen-
sus, 1975), it seems unlikely that these politicians were
While the number of wives per
average American man has gone up,
the number of wives among American
public officials has gone down
1.3-
8 > 1.2 5
E 1.1-
1.0. 1818
Year of Birth 1948
Figure 2. Wives per Man Regressed on Year of Birth of Each Man for All 696 U.S. Politicians
Note: Y = -.001x + 3.555, R2 = .017, ? .0006.
more likely to remarry because their wives were more
likely to die. Neither, at least until very recently, does
divorce seem to have been more frequent among these
powerful men. None of the biographical sources used
here commonly lists whether marital dissolution was
brought on by death or divorce. However, in the bi-
ographies of 19 men which do record such causes, 17
marriages were dissolved because of the wife's death, and
only three were dissolved because of divorce. Second,
powerful men may have been less likely never to marry. This seems probable. Of the 696 men in this sample, only 19 went through life without a wife, a rate of just 2.73%
(see Table 4). Finally, powerful men may have had the
option to remarry more often, following marital disso-
lutions which occurred equally often as, or even less
often than, marital dissolutions among average men.
This too is a possibility. The important question remains unanswered: How
much does this apparent decline in serial polygyny corre-
spond to a decline in male reproductive variance? In
order to answer that question, reliable data are required on the number of legitimate and illegitimate children
produced by privileged and average American men.
Both are hard to find. Information on the number of
legitimate children produced by U.S. politicians in each
of the biographical collections used here is incomplete.
Table 4. Frequency Distribution of Number of Wives
Wives %
0 1
2
3 4
19 532
126 16
3
2.73 76.44
18.10 2.30
0.43
48 Politics and the Life Sciences February 1993
Polygyny
Often, no data whatsoever are provided about children;
sometimes, the number of children is preceded by a
qualifier like "at least"; and even at best, the reproduc- tive history provided consists of no more than a list of
children's names, with no data on years of birth, or death, or sex. A fair comparison of the number of legitimate children produced by more- and less-powerful men will
have to come from a more reliable source (both Johnson, 1989 and Chanley and Chanley, 1989 are trying to find
such sources). The greatest potential for male reproductive variance
in a society where marriage is monogamous is through
polygynous mating. The Roman example already cited
makes this clear; it could be multiplied many times (e.g.,
Betzig, 1992a,c,d). It is hard to tell, though, what extra-
marital options have been open to powerful men at any
period in American history. This is partly because the
public has been consistently concerned with mating
equality. As Miller notes: "Personal behavior which in
other parts of the world would be considered inconse-
quential, or, at least, a public official's private business, has been given enormous importance in our country"
(1973:6). This might be in part because equality of mat-
ing opportunity has been a fundamental component of
equality in other respects. Traditionally, human polygy-
ny has borne a close relationship to dominance, or des-
potism, and monogamy has borne a close relationship to
an absence of dominance, or egalitarianism (Betzig,
1986). Some evidence does suggest, though, that oppor-
tunities for extramarital matings among high-status men
have declined over the last two hundred years. Com-
parative data from Western Europe over the last several
centuries suggest that well-to-do men have been the
most likely fathers of illegitimate children (see Wright-
son, 1980:187), though others suggest that these fathers
have come from a broad occupational spectrum (see,
e.g., Laslett, 1980:56, and other studies in Laslett, Oster-
veen, and Smith, 1980). Studies of illegitimacy in early American society suggest that in some cases servants, and in some cases masters, were the fathers (Wells,
1980:357). In the antebellum south, well-to-do slave owners
sometimes fathered children by slaves. Charles Lyell, in
his Travels in the United States, noticed that "the anxiety of parents for their sons, and a constant fear of their
licentious intercourse with slaves is painfully great"; and
a sister of President Madison is supposed to have said, "We southern ladies are complimented with the name of
wives, but we are only the mistresses of seraglios" (in Calhoun, 1918:308). In his early history of the American
family, Calhoun concluded that "no system of exploita- tion ever respects the virtue of women of the subject class," and that "often the greater number of the master's
children were born of the wives and daughters of his
slaves" (pp. 290-95).
Table 5. Numbers of Slaves Reportedly Owned by Pre- Abolition U.S. Presidents
President Number of Slaves
Source
George Washington (1) John Adams (2) Thomas Jefferson (3) James Madison (4) James Monroe (5) John Quincy Adams (6) Andrew Jackson (7) Martin Van Buren (8) Wm Henry Harrison (9) John Tyler (10) James K. Polk (11)
Zachary Taylor (12) Millard Fillmore (13) Franklin Pierce (14) James Buchanan (15) Abraham Lincoln (16)
216 s More than 100
At least 118
?* s About 100
1+s
s
60 odd
?*
More than 100
0
Mazyck 1932:100
Peabody 1973:341-2
Brodie 1974:23
Ketcham 1971:12
Cresson 1946:474-5
Lipsky 1950
James 1938:349
Niven 1983:381-5
Cleaves 1939-250
Seager 1963:12
McCoy 1960:155
Hamilton 1951:18
Snyder 1975:324
Nichols 1958:64-5
Smith 1975:13-4
Long 1930
Note: An "s" indicates employment of servants in the absence of slaves. *
Of Monroe, Cresson writes that he advertised in 1825 "that he would offer at public sale on the first Monday of June his 3500-acre Albermarle establishment in Virginia, as well as another tract of land of 700 acres near Milton.... In August he wrote McLean, 'My land and slaves have all been sold in Albermarle, as has been the tract of 20,000 acres in Clay county, Kentucky, in satisfaction of debts contracted in the public service.'" Of Polk, McCoy says simply, "It is a fact that Polk was a slaveholder and a plantation owner in Mississippi and that his sympathies were with the South, yet he was first and foremost a Union man."
More recent authorities on American slavery have
agreed that slaves were sometimes the objects of sexual
and reproductive exploitation, but there is no concensus
as to how often (e.g., Stampp, 1967; Blassingame, 1973;
Fogel and Engerman, 1974; Genovese, 1974; Gutman,
1976; White, 1985). As Fogel and Engerman (1974)
argue in Time on the Cross, the real question is whether
such cases were common events only rarely reported, or
rare events that were commonly reported. They cite
census estimates from the rural south suggesting that the
proportion of mulattoes in the slave population was
10.4% in 1860 and 7.7% in 1850. On that basis, they
suggest, "The fact that during the twenty-three decades
of contact between slaves and whites which elapsed be-
tween 1620 and 1850, only 7.7 percent of the slaves were
mulattoes suggests that on average only a very small
percentage of the slaves born in any given year were
fathered by white men" (1974:132). At the same time,
Stampp points out that census counts of mulattoes are
likely underestimates, because census takers classified
individuals solely by appearance, so that both whites and
blacks of mixed ancestry would be excluded from that
Politics and the Life Sciences February 1993 49
Polygyny
category (1967:350-51). Few doubt that miscegenation, when it occurred, most commonly involved poor black
women and well-to-do white men (e.g., White, 1985:
Chapter 1).
Only one top executive in American government, Vice President Richard Johnson, ever owned up to
fathering a bastard by a servant or slave. At the time of
his 1836 election under Martin Van Buren, Johnson
openly supported his two mulatto children by Julia
Chinn, a black slave (e.g., Ross 1988:68). And only one
chief executive, Thomas Jefferson, has ever been serious-
ly accused of having produced illegitimate children by a
slave?by Sally Hemmings, who was Jefferson's dead
wife's half sister by a common father (e.g., Brodie, 1974;
Cunningham, 1987). Biographies of the presidents are
complete enough to suggest that?typical of well-to-do, landed men of their day?the first sixteen chief execu-
tives held, on average, at least 50 slaves. At least nine
presidents from Washington through Lincoln held
slaves themselves; and at least another five kept domes-
tic servants (Table 5).
Obviously, this represents just one possible route to
illegitimacy among the American political elite. The
smattering of evidence that does exist on the illegiti- mates of U.S. presidents involves neither their servants
nor their slaves. Only one president has ever admitted
having fathered a bastard: Grover Cleveland got the
widowed Maria Halpin with child in Buffalo early in his
political career. And only one other president is thought
likely to have fathered an illegitimate: Nan Britton ac-
cused Warren Harding, in writing, of having engendered her daughter (e.g., Miller, 1973; Ross, 1988).
Speculations abound about adulterous liaisons on the
part of presidents and other important persons in
American politics; the vast majority that have been taken
at all seriously, however, involve women who would have
been nearly their lovers' peers in status, and so less likely to bear them illegitimates (e.g., Hartley, 1975). Because
their office is public, presidents may actually have been
less inclined than other men to pursue these kinds of
opportunities. This is suggested, in fact, by what we've
found here: serial polygyny has been more common
among holders of judiciary offices, all of whom are ap-
pointed, and less common among holders of legislative and executive offices, many of whom are elected (Table
3). It is possible, of course, that polygyny in the United
States has been most common among the men least
Because their office is public,
American presidents may have been
less inclined than other men to father
illegitimate children
accountable to the public. Though heads of hierarchies
have been the most polygynous across premodern so-
cieties, they may not be in modern democracies.
It is worth pointing out that public concern with the
affairs of private men seems to have grown. It is hard to
imagine that Richard Johnson could be elected vice
president today as he was in 1836; and it is hard to
imagine that the controversy over Grover Cleveland's
admission would not keep him out of the presidency, which he won for the first time in 1884 (see Miller, 1973;
Ross, 1988). In 1988, Gary Hart's leading candidacy for
the presidency was squelched by rumors that he'd spent a weekend with a model; though more recently, Bill
Clinton's candidacy outlasted allegations of a long-term affair.
At this point, then, the biographical data available
suggest that one aspect of polygyny, that is, serial polyg-
yny, has declined among powerful men in United States
history. What sketchy evidence exists on opportunities to mate outside of marriage very tentatively suggests a
similar trend. More and better data are needed to make
the case that there has in fact been a decline in polygyny in American society, and then to determine whether or
not that decline has been an adaptive strategy.
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